


some things come with no guidebooks or expiration labels

by justlookthroughme



Series: the serum was never why you were special [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky whump, Domestic Avengers, Explosions, F/M, Hurt Bucky Barnes, If You Squint - Freeform, Mission Fic, Missions Gone Wrong, Past Abuse, Sick Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:54:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23670394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justlookthroughme/pseuds/justlookthroughme
Summary: Bruce shuffled a few papers around and slid one over to Steve. “His super-serum is expiring.”“His super-serum is expiring?”“So it would seem.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Natasha Romanov
Series: the serum was never why you were special [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1709590
Comments: 2
Kudos: 61





	some things come with no guidebooks or expiration labels

**Author's Note:**

> A random thought occurred to me -- since Bucky only had the knock-off version of Steve's serum, what if his version had its...limitations, one that would be beneficial to Hydra considering how abusive they were towards him?
> 
> I apologize as this may not be my best work. I was sort of run dry on this one, but I could not let go of the possibility that Bucky's serum might have an expiry date. Also, this was supposed to be much shorter but here we are. 
> 
> Nevertheless, hope you enjoy! xx

“Everyone,” Steve’s voice buzzed through the comm, “get in position.”

Natasha was in charge on-ground. She couldn’t see Bucky, but she knew he was keeping sight of the enemies, sniper rifle aimed at the ready. This mission meant more to him than anything, and it scared her shitless.

“On three. Eyes up, Hawkeye.”

“Ready when you are, Cap.”

“Three. Two. One.”

As soon as Steve’s order came through, Natasha launched into the field and took a Hydra goon out with an uppercut to his jaw that audibly snapped his spine. She could hear Sam’s wings zooming through the air, taking out the enemies’ aircrafts.

Things seemed to go pretty well. Within what felt like minutes, dead Hydras were scattered about – some with Clints’ arrows protruding, some ridden through with Bucky’s bullets, some even decapitated. Natasha noticed earlier how Steve’s shield had blood dripping off the edges. Maybe this mission meant almost as much to Steve as it did to Bucky.

“On-ground clear,” Natasha buzzed in.

“Same up here,” Sam reported.

“Everyone alright?” Steve panted. Natasha could hear the tell-tale sound of the shield sliding back into place behind his back.

“Peachy,” Bucky muttered.

“Rendezvous in five minutes.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.” Clint clicked off.

Natasha was about to head towards their meeting point when a Hydra goon appeared in her line of sight. He had a huge machinery strapped across his shoulders.

“I stand corrected. Missed one,” she reported and proceeded to charge. Just as she got close, a weird looking nozzle appeared from the machinery and it projected a beam of blue laser. _They still have the damn Tesseract_. Natasha narrowly missed it, leaping out of the way. Before she could call for back-up, bullets flew through the air from the ledge of the field but it wasn’t aimed in her direction. The goon was still standing.

Bucky had never missed.

The goon aimed the blue laser towards Bucky’s location, and before Natasha could even warn him, the ledge he was located blew into smithereens.

“ _James_?” Natasha cried, the whole place smothered with debris. She clicked on her comm. “Back-up. East wing.”

“On it,” Sam responded.

She could barely see through stinging eyes, but caught a silhouette of two men in a scuffle. Bucky seemed hurt, maneuvering inept hand-to-hand combat with the assailant, their weapons nowhere to be seen. She leapt onto the goon’s shoulders and tried to put him to sleep with a chokehold. They couldn’t kill him without at least a few questions answered.

Sam’s voice rattled distractedly in her ear. “The rubble has blocked the entrance. Hang on.”

The goon’s movement was too fast even for Natasha’s quick eyes to see. The next thing she knew, there was a wet sound of a knife sliding into Bucky’s abdomen. Bucky’s jaw dropped, and he leaned into the attacker, eyes open but unseeing. Natasha tightened her hold, heart hammering in her chest, trying to put the attacker to sleep faster. Bucky detangled himself from the goon, and the goon collapsed clumsily to the ground, knife in hand. Natasha jumped off of her perch on his shoulders and landed gracefully on her feet. Belatedly, she realized it wasn’t her chokehold that took him down.

Bucky had the goon’s still-beating heart in his metal arm. He dropped it onto the floor, panting, flesh hand shaking and clutching his wound.

“James?”

“That ain’t,” gasp, “a normal Hydra goon.” With no further warning, he fell onto his knees and threw up blood all over Natasha’s boots. Some of it splashed over the goon’s lifeless face.

“Hey, hey, hey, come here,” Natasha whispered, holding Bucky’s shoulders so he wouldn’t fall face-first into his own vomit. His skin was pale and sweaty, and marred with bruises. His breathing was labored, his entire body shaking. He looked like he was going to throw up again.

Natasha pulled him in to lean against her shoulder with one hand and activated her comm with the other. “Bucky needs a medic.” She felt a lump crawling up and residing in her throat.

“I’m pulling the Quinjet.” It was Clint. “It’s gonna take a while. Steve's on his way.”

Natasha could feel Bucky’s blood pouring down her thigh, his head lolling limply over shoulder. His wheezing breaths were heavy against her neck. She could feel his heartbeat slowing against her chest. Gently, Natasha tilted his head back so she could look at him. His eyes remained shut but his lips parted as his breathing labored. “James, honey. Wake up. Come on, stay with me.”

She laid him down gently on the floor, his head slumping over listlessly. “I got you, James. You’re okay, you’re okay,” she panted desperately, checking the rest of his body for other injuries. She noticed a gunshot wound on his left shoulder, in the seams of the metal arm. “Can you hear me? James!” Bucky responded in weak grunts in a few seconds’ delay, signaling that he might be slipping in and out consciousness. His fingers remained tight around his stab wound. “Hey, hey, let me see.” She gently pried them open and tugged at the Kevlar to assess the damage. She swallowed. The knife didn’t just stab him; it had cut him _open_. He was trying to keep his intestines from unspooling.

Bucky made a pained noise. Natasha gathered him into her lap, keeping pressure on the wound. His breathing was erratic and inching towards gasps. She smoothed Bucky’s long hair away from his sweaty face.

Natasha felt the vibrations of the Quinjet hovering above them at the same moment Steve hammered his way in.

“How bad is it?” Steve asked, running over. Hysteria had seeped in through the authoritative tone of his voice.

“Pretty bad.”

Steve scooped up Bucky’s limp body in his arms, careful so as not to jostle him. He glanced at the dead Hydra goon on the floor but said nothing. Natasha noticed the Tesseract machinery was gone.

“Up here!” Sam shouted from the open door of the Quinjet.

**

“I don’t get it. I’ve seen him walk around with four bullets in him,” Steve said, as Sam hunched over Bucky’s wound, tending to it as best as he could before they could reach the hospital.

“That wasn’t a normal Hydra goon,” Natasha parroted Bucky’s earlier statement.

Bucky coughed and his eyes opened blearily. Specks of blood escaped his blue lips. “There you are,” Sam chimed, his smile broad and genuine despite being covered up to his elbows in Bucky’s blood. Bucky turned over to his side and threw up more blood, retching and gasping. Sam’s smile faded immediately, and went back to tearing through the medical kit.

“You’re okay, you’re okay. We’re gonna get you fixed up,” Natasha whispered encouragingly, pushing his damp hair out of his eyes. She and Steve helped Bucky lie back on his back, chest heaving. His eyes were rolling back inside his head. “No, no, no, look at me. James, look at me,” Natasha begged, running a thumb near a still bleeding cut on his eyebrow.

“Why is he not healing?” Natasha detected that note of hysteria again. Subtle, but audible if you knew Steve well.

Bucky held eye contact with Natasha, despite his eyelids drooping. “I got you, I got you,” she whispered. Sam’s hands were moving frantically, trying to keep the blood _inside_. Bucky’s eyes slid shut again.

“Landing in ten,” Clint shouted from the cockpit.

The beeping heart monitor kept Steve awake all night. He didn’t mind in the slightest – it meant Bucky was _alive_. Even just barely, Steve counted all his blessings. His mother taught him to be a good man.

Natasha was looking out the window. She had been quiet all day.

Bucky’s metal arm was restrained to the bed just in case he woke up and lost his bearings. Steve would be grateful for Bucky _just_ to wake up, no matter what his state of mind was, even though he knew that was a little selfish. Bucky had an oxygen mask strapped to the lower half of his face. It reminded Steve of the mask Hydra used to make him wear, which acted more like a muzzle meant to keep him quiet like an animal. Steve felt the anger creeping up and bunching his muscles again, so he shrugged off that thought. He readjusted Bucky’s blanket for him as if Bucky had moved in his sleep. The metal arm whirred, overheating from Bucky’s fever.

It didn’t make sense.

Steve turned around expectantly at the sound of the door opening.

“I got the reports in my lab,” Bruce said quietly.

Sam stretched out tiredly on the couch in the corner of Bucky’s hospital room. “You guys go ahead. I’ll stay here.” Steve felt awful. He had forgotten Sam was even there the whole time.

“Thank you, Sam,” he said, hoping his tone conveyed more than his words ever could.

Natasha dropped a kiss on Bucky’s forehead. She turned and rubbed Sam’s shoulder appreciatively on the way out, following Bruce out the door.

They settled inside Bruce’s lab, a few floors above the medical wing of Stark’s tower. Natasha stood by the window the way she did in Bucky’s hospital room, as if sitting down was a commitment to something she just didn’t have the energy to focus on at the moment.

Bruce pulled out a heavy file that looked familiar. All of Bucky’s medical and scientific reports that they managed to get from Hydra bases were compiled, and added to each time Bruce made a new discovery about the mutation of his genetics or each time Tony tinkered with his metal arm. Tony had made him about three metal arms now. Bucky was still afraid of labs and medical procedures, but he endured it for Bruce and Tony.

“JARVIS just collected this data. I ran some tests on Bucky’s blood and it checks out.” Bruce shuffled a few papers around and slid one to Steve. “His super-serum is expiring."

Steve blinked. Suddenly he forgot how to read. “His super-serum is _expiring_?”

“Let me see.” Natasha rushed over and grabbed Steve’s wrist to bring the report closer to herself.

Steve’s eyes skimmed over it and found phrases like “unable to replenish”, “a booster serum” and finally, “to ensure the Asset returns after injury.” He couldn’t focus anymore. His hands balled into fists, crumpling the paper. All he could think about was how satisfying it had been to sever the heads of all those Hydra goons earlier yesterday. Distractedly, he heard Natasha curse under her breath.

“What does this mean for him?” Steve asked. Bruce took the document back from him wordlessly and smoothed it out on the table. It felt like his lungs were seizing again, the way it did when he was a sickly boy in Brooklyn. “Is he dying?”

“No, no,” Bruce interjected quickly. “It just takes time for him to recover, like any normal man would.”

“But his metal arm…”

“The metal arm will soon be too heavy for him but I assume Tony will handle that.”

Natasha had gone quiet again, her fist pressed against her lips.

Bruce looked Steve in the eye. “There are chances that complications would arise,” he stated calmly. Natasha’s stiff posture sagged, like she had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. “This has never happened in history. We don’t know how this may affect his genetics."

“How long has it been expiring?” Natasha questioned.

“I studied his cells earlier.” Bruce pulled out a drawer and retrieved another file. “See these tiny dots? These are the serum. Compare to this.” He laid out another picture of Bucky’s blood cells side by side. “This is the result of his bloodwork when he first came to the Tower.”

Steve was no scientist, but he could see that the amount of serum in Bucky’s blood had severely depleted.

“That _was_ a normal Hydra goon, then,” Natasha muttered, “who happened to have the Tesseract. Bucky couldn’t take him down as easily because they were at equal strengths. And Bucky was already injured in the battle.”

“They found the Tesseract, trapped under the rubble after the explosion. Fury has it contained and locked away. It’s safe.”

“One less thing to worry about,” Bruce nodded. He collected the lab prints and filed everything away, as if he was afraid Steve would tear it all apart.

“What do we do now?” Natasha asked.

Bruce’s shoulders slumped apologetically. “We just see how his body, and him, respond to it. And be prepared for emergencies.”

***

Natasha had fallen asleep in the chair of Bucky’s hospital room, her upper body lying on the edge of Bucky’s bed. She roused to the feeling of someone stroking her hair. Raising her head, she saw Bucky smiling tiredly at her. His eyes had dark circles underneath, and he was still too pale to be healthy, but at least he didn’t look like death anymore.

“Hey there.” She grabbed his hand – the flesh one – and reached up to kiss him on his sweaty forehead. His temperature was slowly going down. “You got us worried sick.”

“Fucking Hydra,” Bucky mumbled underneath the oxygen mask. He seemed to be a little loopy from the morphine. Bruce’s quick thinking stopped them from immediately giving him a super-soldier dosage; otherwise he would have died right there on the gurney not from the wound but from something as avoidable as an overdose. He tried to hold Natasha close with both arms but realized his metal arm was stuck.

Natasha watched as panic set in when he saw that the arm was bound with an industrial cuff to the bed railings. “James, it’s okay –“

He began hyperventilating, looking back at her with terrified eyes and ripped the oxygen mask off of his face. “We have – we have to go –“

“No, baby, you’re safe.” Natasha held the mask back to his face against his will. “James, you need to breathe. You’re at the Tower –“

Bucky struggled, kicking at his sheets and trying to rip his metal arm from the cuff. Natasha held on to his flesh arm with both hands. Even recovering and with a lack of super-serum, he was still stronger than an average human. “What did they do to me?” he shrieked. “Why am I sick?”

Natasha felt a pang of regret for letting the hospital tie him down like this to avoid this exact outcome, but it was what ended up triggering him instead. A string of movies where the inevitable still happened anyway despite the characters’ best efforts at changing their fates flashed through her mind. “Listen to me. You’re safe. Your immune system is shot because your serum is expiring,” she said quickly in a stream of words, trying to calm him down before someone called the nurses to sedate him. That would only add to his trauma.

It worked. The confusion stopped Bucky short. He paused, catching his breath. “What?”

Natasha rubbed his flesh arm between her hands to comfort him. “The serum is steadily depleting from your system. No, no, hey,” she interjected quickly as he began to struggle again, “this is not a bad thing. We don’t know how it will affect your genetics yet but you’ll be a normal person again, James. You never asked for any of this, and now you get to pull out of the Avengers if you want. You and I could get a farmhouse, like Clint’s—“

“And I just sit and twiddle my mismatched thumbs while you go out on missions?” Bucky countered flatly, chest heaving. He ripped the oxygen mask off again. “Serum, or no serum, I am still responsible for all the lives I have taken the past fifty years. _Fifty_ , Natasha. And now I can’t even try to wipe the red out of _my_ ledger as effectively as I got them.” He dropped himself back onto the bed angrily, panting harshly. “ _Fuck_!”

Natasha held onto his flesh arm. She didn’t like saying words of comfort that she didn’t believe herself, so she held her tongue.

Bucky finally managed to put his thoughts into order and demanded, "What do you mean its depleting?”

Natasha stroked his bruised knuckles. “Your serum isn’t quite like Steve’s. Every time they put you in cryo, the serum was being renewed. It was a fail-safe system they had – if you managed to escape long enough to remember yourself, the serum would have depleted by then and you won’t be able to go after them. Also, if you were injured, you would be forced to return to base for…for maintenance.”

Bucky’s anguish turned into tears. “ _Fuck Hydra_!” he cried. “ _Fuck_!” he screamed, head slamming into the pillows and metal arm tugging against the restraints. Natasha slowly crawled into bed with him as he wept uncontrollably. “I can’t—I can never escape them – they’re at every corner, in every fucking nightmare…” His words trailed off into broken sobs. His body shook as the sobs wracked through his body.

Natasha didn’t say anything. She just buried her nose in his long, brown hair and wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could. How she wished to hold him so hard until all his broken pieces clicked back into place. She reached over to unlock the cuff that secured his metal arm. He barely noticed, unravelling right there in her arms. She held his metal arm, stroking it, tenderly squeezing each one of the metal fingertips in turn. She knew he could feel it. He wept and wept, shaking like a lost child. Natasha closed her eyes and cursed every Hydra member who had ever laid a hand on him, tearing apart the gentlest soul she had ever met in her fifty-odd years and put him back together as a killing machine, forcing him to go back against every single moral he had, stripping him of his identity, his memories, his _life_ , everything that the kind soldier Bucky Barnes ever was.

If she was being honest, Natasha thought that James was even better than Bucky. Even broken and wrongly put back together, James was a man aged by circumstances that taught him to be even more compassionate, to value everything he had, and an obsession to do good. It wasn’t a very far departure from Bucky who was a bright young soldier – it was just Bucky at his full potential, despite the obvious damages.

As it was always said; good becomes great, bad becomes worse. Bucky had always thought he was evil to begin with, how he used to do all of Steve’s dirty work for him during the war, shooting enemies clean in between their eyes without blinking. He believed it was why he was easily turned into a weapon. He would scream about it in his sleep, caught in night terrors. It broke Natasha’s heart because she knew that none of it was true. Hydra twisted everything _good_ about Bucky – his loyalty, his precision, his dedication – and twisted it in their favor.

James was everything that was left of Bucky, if barely. He was a new man, with Bucky’s qualities and memories and traumas. But he was everything Natasha could ever dream of, and she could never love him any less.

She held onto him for hours, until his shaking subsided and he had fallen asleep. Her fingers ghosted over his face, trying to wipe the tears without waking him. Sometimes she wished that he had just died when he fell off the train, or better yet, never got on it in the first place, to save him from all the horrors that he would never heal from. She would take that, even if it meant never having met him.

***

It had been slightly more than a week since Bucky woke up in the hospital, and the serum was completely gone from his system, leaving expired traces that were a little hard for his newly adjusted immune system to handle.

“God,” Bucky complained, between throwing up into the basin Steve held under his chin. “Does this expired serum thing mean I have to live with the effects of, like, eating spoiled food for the rest of my life?” He heaved again, but nothing came out.

Steve took the basin away once he was done. “Not really. Just until all of it is gone from your body, that’s all.”

“This really sucks, you know that?”

Steve stuck a thermometer into his mouth. “You really are turning into me,” Steve said dryly, “about a half a century ago.”

Bucky didn’t retort. He was tired and the thermometer under his tongue was making him nauseous.

Steve slid the thermometer out when it beeped. He glanced at the tiny digital screen. “Doing better already. Now go to sleep.”

“ _Steve_ ,” Bucky grumbled. He still looked pale, but it wasn’t anything to worry about. “Is this payback for all the times I took care of you when you were sick?”

Steve considered. “I wouldn’t consider it _payback_. But yeah, this is kinda fun.” He gently pushed Bucky back against the pillows. Bucky was too tired to protest.

Silence fell between them as Steve collected Bucky’s medicines and half-eaten plates of food.

“Steve,” he croaked.

“What is it, pal?”

Bucky paused for a moment. “I’m glad we have better medicine now.”

Steve chuckled. “You and me both, Buck.” Bucky looked like he had more to say, so Steve waited. After an awkward few seconds, he was about to head to the door when Bucky called him again.

“Steve.”

“Yeah?”

Bucky pinched his blanket between his fingers, fiddling with it, avoiding Steve’s eyes. “If I…quit, would you think any less of me?”

Steve stared at him, letting the weight of what Bucky was saying settle into his bones. “Bucky, there is nothing in the world I would want more for you.” There was, like Bucky never having fallen off the train in the first place, but there was nothing anyone could do about that.

“But I will.” His voice was small, but heavy with every definition of anger and frustration.

“What changed your mind?”

Bucky shrugged. “Clint’s got it pretty good. I guess I’m jealous.”

Steve smiled. “And so will you. The past is not in your control anymore, Buck. Hydra’s gone. You can start over.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agreed softly, tracing patterns on the blanket. He looked uncomfortable about discussing the matter any further. “Now get out of here. I gotta sleep.”

Steve chuckled. Bucky needed his space, and that was fine. He could only imagine how hard it was for him to come to this decision at all. “Nat would be here soon.” He shut the door.

If quitting the Avengers was what would give Bucky peace, then that was what he would get. In the meantime, Steve would nurse him and be at his beck and call, returning the favor Bucky did for him years ago. Nothing had to change, even if they lived completely different lives now.

Steve liked to think that somewhere, in an alternate universe, there was another version of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes who survived the war and lived long happy _normal_ lives. But they were here and not there, and surrounded by friends who have become family.

Sure, nothing about their lives now would ever be normal – there would always be aliens from the skies, or Titans trying to play God – but Steve was pretty sure they would be okay. He will make sure of it.


End file.
